Posts by Anon

NASA fixes Hubble Space Telescope using backup power supply unit, payload computer

YAY NASA!

YAY NASA!

YAY CAREFUL AND CONSIDERED ENGINEERING!

Thank you to all the people who have worked so hard on this.

Kaspersky Password Manager's random password generator was about as random as your wall clock

Re: If you value your security get a hardware random number generator -- or two

Why do you trust trust TrueRNG? How can I trust your reply?

Pentagon scraps $10bn JEDI winner-takes-all cloud contract

Re: The government should own its own cloud

I thought that the government was meant to be the consolidation and supplying of the people's requirements, for the benefit of the people. (And the people include those suppliers.)

Openreach to UK businesses: Switch is about to hit the fan. Prepare for withdrawal of the copper-based phone network now or risk disruption

Re: I don't understand

BT have Phorm (q.v.) on honour.

IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster, sources say

Re: the big four

> the big four of enterprise email (Gmail, Outlook, Notes)

I don't think I want any of those three to account for two...

Seagate finds sets of two heads are cheaper than one in its new and very fast MACH.2 dual-actuator hard disks

Is it really a new idea?

This was an obvious idea since hard disk drives were created. Why didn't the massive performance improvement of zero track-to-track delay (taking into account rotational latency) for larger files, and better performance anyway, from having two complete sets of heads ever become a thing? Or did it, and it never made it to user-level compoinents?

OVH reveals it's scrubbing servers – to get smoke residue off before rebooting

Oh, that sort of cleaning

I was hoping they were going to clean the malware mongerers off.

Apple's latest macOS Big Sur update stops cheapo USB-C hubs bricking your machine

Loius Rossmann, who repairs Macs and is a proponent of right-to-repair in the US on his YouTube channel, seems to find that the only thing that doesn't fail in Apple laptops is the fuses.

CD Projekt Red 'EPICALLY pwned': Cyberpunk 2077 dev publishes ransom note after company systems encrypted

Go get 'em!

Did the hackers pause to consider that the victim might have enough money to put a considerable bounty for their imprisonment on their heads?

How do you save an ailing sales pitch? Just burn down the client's office with their own whiteboard

Re: Switching

A 240/230/220/110 switch usually indicates that a large iron-core transformer is being used, and the switch changes which tap on the primary is used, or for 110 V puts two (to better handle the doubled current) primary windings in parallel.

Not all switched-mode power supplies have an active power factor correction (PFC) stage which can work with a large range of input voltages. The ones that don't have active PFC have a switch to change between the input capacitors being wired in parallel (for 110 V) or series (for 230 V); they will of course only be rated for 200 V or so as there's no point using larger and more expensive capacitors. 230 VAC rectified gives about 325 V. Electrons with an excitement level of 325 V are partying too hard to be contained by a 200 V-rated cap, and the magic smoke and sparks escape.

Cisco intros desktop switches, one with USB-C to power your laptop

All your packets are belong to us

When did Cisco start supplying equipment that is not compromised?

Other manufacturers may be /suspect/, but the USA's security forces have proven by their own actions that you can't trust anything made in the USA.

Apart from we still love NASA.

Re: To all the downvoters... woosh!

You /only/ get a whoosh with a Wotsit.

(Crackly packet in the pocket.)

Extreme Networks misses death-of-Flash deadline, suggests winding back PC clocks to keep its GUI alive

Extreme Networks says...

"THREE-PEAT"

We're so famous we don't even have to say what we do!

No, really, why are they advertising for Gartner as the start of their website?

Brexit freezes 81,000 UK-registered .eu domains – and you've all got three months to get them back

Re: I won’t be able to use what I’ve paid for

What are the published uncertainties/error bounds/spread/confidence levels in PWC's predictions?

The report you appear to quote from,

https://www.pwc.co.uk/press-room/press-releases/uk-could-remain-top-10global-economy-in-2050.html

says that the UK could fall from 9th to 10th or 5th to 9th place in the world by 2050, depending on the measure chosen.

FALL.

Trump's overhaul of Section 230 stalls, Biden may just throw the web legal shield on the bonfire anyway

Dear Chief Justice of the USA...

During the swearing-in ceremony, please point at Trump and say "You're fired!"

My website has raised its anchor and set sail into the internet oceans without me

Re: I have working 5G

Just wait until your government makes them tear out all the Huawei kit that makes that work...

Cats: Not a fan favourite when the critters are draped around an office packed with tech

Re: I have the only key

"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." -- A.C. Doyle

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." -- Peter Steiner

Put the two together, and... who's a good boy, Jake? Yes, you’re a good boy! Yes you are!

BOFH: Switch off the building? Great idea, Boss

Re: Messing with oxygen-fluorine compounds

Things I Won’t Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride

There are plenty more interesting "things I won't work with" too.

For every disastrous rebrand, there is an IT person trying to steer away from the precipice

Re: Accident or intent?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ CK FU knows?

[Checks meeting agenda...] Where does it say 'Talk cr*p and waste everyone's time'?

Using Linux

That's the beauty of using Linux - you can simply write any driver that you need and then make it available to everyone else.

Python swallows Java to become second-most popular programming language... according to this index

Re: "My first programming language, at age 9, was a Lisp dialect."

Oh aye, lickin' the user input: first stage garbage collection. Next step were th' cleaning out th' next generation shite wi' owse toes, down th' sewers if we'se were lucky. T'urd generation garbage? That's only rich kids, wi' their fancy grammar 'n' some idea of a consistent accent.

One more reason for Apple to dump Intel processors: Another SGX, kernel data-leak flaw unearthed by experts

Apple?

"The paper explains, and points to other CPU vendors like ... Arm ... ." So, Apple's new system may also be vulnerable.

Did The Register get any reply from Apple on the matter yet?

If you suddenly can't print to your HP Printer from your Mac, you're not alone: Code security cert snafu blamed

Re: HP problems

"good printers ... based on hardware that was" ... made by Canon.

Iran sent threatening pro-Trump emails to American Democrats, Russia close behind, says US intelligence

Re: QAnus

'"QAnus" Love. It. Can I use it?'

Well, at least take it out for a nice meal first...

Developer survey: C# losing ground to JavaScript, PHP and Java for cloud apps, still big in gaming

Re: Why...

Yes, JavaScript should obviously have been lumped together with Java instead.

Intel celebrates security of Ice Lake Xeon processors, so far impervious to any threat due to their unavailability

--hidden-backdoors=-1

--hidden-backdoors=-1 ... and then they go and interpret it as an unsigned integer and you get a sieve delivered.

BOFH: Rome, I have been thy soldier 40 years... give me a staff of honour for mine age

Re: Thats my first guffaw in delight for a while.

Try clotted cream on dark chocolate digestives. You can pretend it is to keep the crumbs under control (it doesn't).

Not one to be outdone by Microsoft, Apple's cloud fell over too. Unlike Microsoft, it hasn't said what happened

Are you asking for a failure which trumps all other failures?

Who watches the watchers? Samsung does so it can fling ads at owners of its smart TVs

The bastards!

Would they also force this on their grandmothers?

Brexit border-line issues: Would you want to still be 'testing' software designed to stop Kent becoming a massive lorry park come 31 December?

Re: It's rude to keep the drugs to your self, pass the duchy 'pon the left hand side..

The delivery date is movable, but some people in the U.K. government want to impose their bizarre notions of reality on the rest of us.

What a time for a TITSUP*: Santander down and out on pre-Bank Holiday payday

Re: SNAFU

The bank could have made a few tens of millions on the money that was delayed in transit, so bonuses and trebles all round (no, not for us).

Mysterious metadata monster swamped Google’s blobs and crashed its cloud

Someone finally did it!

Someone googled for Google and it started imploding...

Microsoft nudges latest TypeScript iteration out onto the mean streets of JavaScript

SQRL!

I'm not sure how reliable that Stack Overflow survey is, seeing as they forgot about VB.NET.

Mind you, it seems Microsoft might be forgetting about VB.NET too.

America's largest radio telescope blind after falling cable slashes 100-foot gash in reflector dish

Breaking glass

They should have made the the cables as strong as the Unknown Pleasures album - it was pressed into vinyl about twice the thickness of a regular LP.

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

Re: Which is why I always turn off email sigs...

How's the photocopier meant to copy that shade of blue? So inconsiderate of them.

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

Re: Windows 2000

Ah, how quickly people forget about Project AIRhead 2000...

Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel, starting now

Changing the wrong words

Why don't they change the words for master and slave in the slavery sense? Then we can keep master and slave for all the other meanings.

Euro police forces infiltrated encrypted phone biz – and now 'criminal' EncroChat users are being rounded up

Re: Why am I thinking about 1960s Batman?

Because you've been watching The Defpom's Mailbag Monday?

ZFS co-creator boots 'slave' out of OpenZFS codebase, says 'casual use' of term is 'unnecessary reference to a painful experience'

Homonym

Weave herd of it, but 2 hard.

(No /s necessary for the .uk site, I hope; don't let the side down, chaps.)

Someone got so fed up with GE fridge DRM – yes, fridge DRM – they made a whole website on how to bypass it

online profanity filters are awful

Yes, they don't really work.

dashdashnewline

Anon of Sc[aeiou]nthorpe.

Ooo, a mystery bit of script! Seems legit. Let's see what happens when we run it

Loo roll perforations

If you separate the plies and unroll one of them one turn, the perforations usually line up. I haven't tried that with 3+ ply paper.

Trump issues toothless exec order to show donors, fans he's doing something about those Twitter twerps

A new amendment! The really bigly one!

Would a president of the USA push for an amendment to the constitution of the USA that requires a presidential candidate to take a sociopath test - and be declared as /not/ a sociopath - before being allowed to be their president? I'm sure the current president could pass, of course ;)

Micros~1? ClippyZilla? BSOD Bob? There can be only one winner. Or maybe two

Crash

Too close to—what became—a Macromedia product FutureSplash, and we can all guess what name came from cutting out most of the middle letters of that.

Mirror mirror on the wall, why will my mouse not work at all?

Re: All been there

Push plates may be cheaper, but they're no use when the wind is stronger than the auto-closer.

Users of Will.i.am's Wink IoT hub ask 'Where is the love?' as they're asked to pay for a new subscription service

Re: Cue the lawsuits in 3, 2, 1...

It's even worse: they sometime say "and we may make changes at any time"... "and you should check for changes yourself"...

There should be a law against that - yeah! Change the law and don't tell the weasel-word-generators that the law has changed!

This space is intentionally left blank

Whose milk?

Had a mate who used Karen's milk when making a round of tea. Unknown to him at the time, Karen's /expressed/ milk.

UK COVID-19 contact-tracing app data may be kept for 'research' after crisis ends, MPs told

Re: It can go

Surely

(I'm a frequent visitor to the village and in regular contact with a number of the locals and they *really* took the isolation thing seriously)

is not the same as

(they *really* took the isolation thing seriously)

?